It’s become no secret that Scottie Pippen felt overlooked during his time with the Chicago Bulls, which he spent in large part playing in Michael Jordan’s shadow.
Now, the Hall-of-Famer is reckoning with his time with the Bulls, and boy is he holding nothing back. In his new book Unguarded, an excerpt of which as published by GQ, Pippen goes in on Jordan the Bulls franchise, and the seminal documentary series The Last Dance, which he says placed Jordan on a pedestal. Pippen writes that Jordan would “never have become” the Michael Jordan we know today without him and the rest of his teammates.
He also writes that he and Jordan have never had a tight friendship. “Michael and I aren’t close and never have been,” Pippen explains in the book.
As for his gripes with The Last Dance, Pippen laments that Jordan earned millions for being the leading man in the series, while the rest of his teammates got nothing. “Michael received $10 million for his role in the doc while my teammates and I didn’t earn a dime, another reminder of the pecking order from the old days. For an entire season, we allowed cameras into the sanctity of our locker rooms, our practices, our hotels, our huddles…our lives,” he wrote, per GQ.
Pippen was also upset that Jordan had such a huge part in the doc’s creation, with Pippen writing that it ultimately focused on MJ and pushed him and the other players to the sidelines. “I was nothing more than a prop,” he writes. “His ‘best teammate of all time,’ [Jordan] called me. He couldn’t have been more condescending if he tried.”
Pippen believes that Jordan’s motivation to do the doc was at least in part fueled by his desire to remind this generation of his legacy, especially in the face of the neverending LeBron James GOAT debate.
He writes that he saw himself and the rest of the team as Jordan’s “supporting cast” who were given “little or no credit whenever we won but the bulk of the criticism when we lost” and called MJ the “errorless Jordan.”
“Over the next few weeks, I spoke to a number of my former teammates who each felt as disrespected as I did,” he writes. “How dare Michael treat us that way after everything we did for him and his precious brand.”
While Pippen conceded that Jordan was a “spectacular” player, but writes that Jordan “relied on the success we attained as a team—six titles in eight years—to propel him to a level of fame throughout the world no other athlete, except for Muhammad Ali, has reached in modern times.”
Unguarded releases Nov. 9. You can buy it here, or wherever books are sold. Read the excerpt in its entirety here.
